Opening the Door to Public Access to Publicly Funded Research.

The article reports on the launch of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) on January 9, 2007. UKPMC is the British version of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central. It will provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. The service is the product of work done by the Wellcome Trust to encourage British research-funding bodies to promote and encourage open access publishing. A special manuscript-submission system has been also introduced to let scientists submit articles that have been accepted in a peer-reviewed journal directly to UKPMC.